How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

As soon as I resolved my students’ questions about what had happened to my father before he reached Sudan, I returned to the story of his still-burgeoning friendship with Abrahim. I told them more about how my father spent his afternoons with him learning to fit in at the dusty port town in which he had found himself, and how Abrahim taught him a few words of Arabic and how to make a proper greeting and departure when it came to strangers. While much of what I had said until then was a mix of fact and fiction, Abrahim had a real history I could draw from. Abrahim had played an active role in my father’s memory, and by extension mine as well. My father had mentioned him regularly, not as a part of normal conversation but as a casual aside that could come up at any time without warning. Unbidden, my father had often said that Abrahim was the only real friend he had ever had, and on several occasions he had credited him with saving his life. At other times my father had claimed that the world was full of crooks, and that after his experiences with a man named Abrahim in Sudan, he would never trust a Sudanese, Muslim, or African again.

  I could never have asked him what exactly Abrahim had done for him, or what their relationship had been like, but I had never asked him anything to begin with, not about his past, his current intentions, or his plans for the future. By the time I was old enough to be genuinely curious about what type of man my father had been before I knew him, I had made up my mind already. He had been a bastard from birth and would remain one until he died. Anything beyond that was irrelevant. Often, however, I did think that it would have been better if Abrahim had let him die, or I remember wishing that at the very least Abrahim had managed to inflict some righteous form of punishment, one strong enough to be felt for decades, right up to and including the moment that had my father standing over me with his fist raised. Some children need heroes to right the imbalances in their world and to settle the scores that they can’t; I would have taken a greater villain any day of the week.

  The Abrahim who came to life in my classroom was a far nobler man than the one I had previously imagined, and was more likely than not a more decent man than the one who had actually existed, and maybe even still did exist in the port town where my father had found him. This Abrahim had a flair for blunt yet nonetheless poetic statements, like the time he told my father that even the sand in the port town was of a quality inferior to the kind he had known in his home village, hundreds of kilometers west of here. “Everything here is shit,” he said. “Even the sand.” He had a soft, gentle voice that barely rose above a whisper, and unlike most of the other men in the town, was immaculate in his dress and perfect in his manners.

  I relayed all this to my students in a slightly dispassionate voice only marginally different from the one I used to teach my standard English lessons. I wanted to give them the impression that this was a true history being told. And even though it was unnecessary, I began to support my story with dates and figures. “It was late June now and the rains were about to start. Ten to fifteen boats were pulling into the harbor every day, and soon, once the rains had passed, there would be three to four times more.

  “My father went to great lengths to disguise his origins; he bought himself two white djellabas and grew a small beard. When asked where he was from, he said that he was a Muslim from Asmara, where barely even the imams spoke Arabic. Did you know what was happening right now in Asmara? he would then add. It was terrible. The communist Ethiopians were killing Muslims by the thousands, bombing their villages into ashes because this was what Moscow and most likely America wanted. That’s why he was here. He had barely escaped with his own life, he would add, thanks only to the mercy and grace of God.

  “Abrahim got him a better-paying job as a porter on the docks. He told him on their third full day together, ‘You’re going to be my best investment yet. Everything I give to you I will get back tenfold.’ His words were cryptic and yet were said in a tone that made it impossible to be afraid. Abrahim came by almost every day to share a cup of tea shortly after evening prayers, when hundreds of individual trails of smoke from the campfires would be winding their way up into the sky along with the prayers that only minutes ago had preceded them. Abrahim would pinch and pull at my father’s waist as if he were a goat or a sheep and then say, ‘What do you expect, I have to check on the health of my investment. ’ Afterward, as he was leaving, he would always offer him the same simple piece of advice:

  “‘Stretch, Yosef,’ he would yell out. ‘Stretch all the time until your body becomes as loose as a monkey’s.’

  “At the docks he carried boxes from dawn until midday, when it became too hot to work. Before his shift at the teahouse, he’d take a nap under a tree and look at the sea and think about the water in front of him. Like most of the men he was thirsty all the time, and he was convinced that there was something irreparably cruel about a place that put water that could not be drunk in front of you. He imagined building a boat of his own, something simple but sturdy that could at the very least make its way across the Gulf into Saudi Arabia. And if that was to fail, then he’d stuff himself into a box, hurl himself into the water and drift until he reached a foreign shore or died trying. Even that, he thought, would be better than a lifetime of this.”

  When I was afraid the story was moving too slowly, I moved the narrative back into the heart of the port town. I filled its streets and harbor as best I could with a sense of mystery and danger not unlike the type that could be found in old black-and-white movies with raincoat-clad men in foreign settings, or even in more contemporary accounts of Africa that never shied away from reveling in the continent’s darkness, both literal and imagined. The story needed intrigue and conspiracy and until then was wholly lacking in villains of any sort, and while I initially saw these sidelines as being at best only marginally related to the story I had begun, I quickly found that they had a purpose as well. Somewhere on the blank canvas on which parts of my father’s life was starting to take form, there had surely been moments in which he had been forced to take stock of the greater machinations occurring around him, and as I sat in my classroom early each morning, completely alone with the exception of the school’s janitor, I tried to imagine, without bias, what some of those moments might have been. He had throughout his life been an ardently politically minded man of the conspiratorial sort and was fond of accusing any government or head of state in the news as being full of lies. American politicians were all liars; the former Soviet Union was full of fucking liars, and all of Western Europe was bullshit. Ronald Reagan had been a hero almost everywhere in Illinois but in our house, except for those moments when the president was threatening war; the same was true of every president who followed, Republican and Democrat alike. The only heroes for him were those who had died, the Lincolns, Kings, and Kennedys, and even then I suspect it was only because in dying they proved what he had known all along about corruption, power, and the hidden forces who really governed things. He was fond of saying that he was certain to see some sort of coup take place in America within his lifetime. “People don’t think these things can happen,” he would say, not to me or to my mother, but to the television, whose early-evening news often sparked these proclamations. “Because they are stupid and don’t know better. But I know how governments really work.” And while I had always dismissed such statements as those of a paranoid man who had come to consider his experiences as vastly more important than they really were, I realized now that they must have had their origin somewhere, and here at last with my students I was starting to discover them.

  “At least once or twice a week, Abrahim would pick my father up from his room in the evening and walk him down to the docks in order to explain to him how the port town really worked. The two would walk slowly, careful not to disturb anyone or draw attention to themselves, partly out of fear of being robbed. The port was an entirely different town come dark. The only lights came from the scattered corner fires around which groups of men were huddled. Despite the darkness, people moved around freely and in even greater numbers than
during the day. It was as if a second city were buried underneath the first and were excavated each night. Women without veils could be spotted along some of the narrow back streets, and my father could smell roasting meat and strong liquor.

  “It was down at the harbor, in the shadows cast by the bright lights that illuminated the piers, that Abrahim taught my father how to interpret the ships and cargo that were being quietly unloaded under military guard.

  “‘The ships that you see at the far end of the port are all government controlled,’ he told him. ‘They carry one of two things: food or weapons. We don’t make either of them in Sudan. You may have noticed this. That doesn’t mean we don’t love them equally. Maybe the weapons more. Have you ever seen a hungry man with a gun? Of course not. Such things don’t exist. It’s like saying, have you ever seen a hungry lion? Of course not, because as soon as you did he wouldn’t be hungry anymore. The men here with guns are the same. Always stay away from that part of the dock. It’s run by a couple of generals and a colonel who report straight to the president. They can shoot, arrest, kill anyone they want. They’ve done it many times before. They are like gods in this little town, but with better cars. If a soldier sees you there’s nothing I can do to help. Not even God will save a fool.’

  “‘The food is supposed to go to the south. It comes from America and Europe and from all over the world in great big sacks that say USA. Instead it goes straight to Khartoum with the weapons. And do you know why? Because it’s easier and cheaper to starve people to death than to shoot them. Bullets cost money. Soldiers cost money. Bombs cost a lot of money. Keeping all the food in a warehouse costs nothing. Even better you can sell it to buy more bullets and soldiers just in case what you have isn’t enough already. Everything destroying this country is happening right there.’

  “In the course of several evenings Abrahim worked his way steadily down the line of boats docked in the harbor. His favorite ones, he said, were those near the end.

  “‘You see the ships at the very end of the harbor? They are full of oil. Barrels and barrels of it. All of it comes from the Middle East, but we have plenty of it right here in Sudan. Enough to make us all rich, but the government doesn’t want us to know that. It’s true. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone. Who knows, though, maybe in ten or fifteen years things will change. Maybe then we will all be like the Saudis and those other Arabs, living in big houses with Mercedeses, rather than living here like rats. If that happens, believe me, you will wish you never left here.’

  “On other late-night journeys to the port Abrahim described to my father how he planned to get him out. He showed him a group of newly arrived ships and told him that as far as my father was concerned, those were the most important boats in the world.

  “‘And those ships over there, the ones all the way at the other end. Those are the ones you need to think about. Those are the ones that go to Europe. You know how you can tell? Look at the flags. You see that one there—with the black and gold? It goes all the way to Italy or Spain. Maybe even France. Some of the men who work on it are friends of mine. Business associates. You can trust them. They’re not like the rest of the people here who will disappear with your money.’

  “After several visits to the pier at night, my father began to take seriously Abrahim’s advice about stretching. He worked his body into various controlled positions that he would hold for ten, fifteen, and eventually thirty minutes and then for as long as an hour. At night before he went to bed he practiced sitting with his legs crossed and then he stretched his back by curling himself into a ball. After four months he could hold that position for hours, which was precisely what Abrahim had told him he would need to do.

  “‘The first few hours will be the hardest,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to be on the ship before it’s fully loaded and then you will have to stay completely hidden. Only once it’s far out to the sea will you be able to move.’

  “My father thought about writing letters back to his family, but he didn’t know what to say. No one, not even his wife, knew for certain if he was alive, and until he was confident that he would remain so, he preferred to keep it that way. It was better than writing home and saying, ‘Hello. I miss you. I’m alive and well,’ when only the first half of that statement was certain to still be true by the time the letter arrived.”

  XIX

  For the next twenty-five miles, my father drove in what he believed to be the direction of the Illinois-Tennessee border, full of grand and heady thoughts. If asked what exactly he was thinking of, he would have said that he was remembering the names of every border he had crossed throughout his life, and that there was a time when he imagined that was precisely what he was going to do for the rest of his days, cross and recross different lines on a map until he had touched and memorized them all. The first time he had crossed a border had seemed like something of a miracle to him. The pickup truck he and a dozen other people had been hiding in had pulled over abruptly, and the driver, a tall, lanky man from one of the border tribes who was Ethiopian some days, Sudanese on others, walked over to the rear of the truck and threw the blue tarp off their backs. With the sun suddenly glaring down on them, he had declared, rather proudly in English: Welcome to Sudan. Those who hadn’t paid the full fare into town were pushed out of the truck, and for the first time in two days there were only two other people. My father suddenly had enough room to stretch his legs and stare freely out at a blinding midday sun that would soon scorch his lips and leave him faint and nearly dying for water. The people who got out of the truck gathered their belongings, if they had any, and headed off in separate directions. No one stopped to look back at what had been the border—a thin frayed line of rope stretched between two trees and guarded by two soldiers who were just as gaunt as the half-dead trees they were resting under for shade. Those departing simply walked off, a few alone, most in groups, in the direction of what appeared to be, and most likely was, little more than sand, dirt, and wild thorn brush, with a hamlet of straw-and-mud houses identical to the ones they had left behind in Ethiopia. My father felt like he couldn’t have been the only one who wanted to say it, but in the end no one did, perhaps because it was so obvious a thought, or perhaps because there was no simple way to express an idea with so many contradictions inherent in it—so much for so little, and yet still we’re left with nothing at all.

  Every time he crossed a border since then he remembered that first one. Other crossings were grander in scale and offered more dramatic backdrops—Africa into Europe, Europe into America, and even Europe into Europe, but none bore the weight and meaning of the first. For all the expressed differences between the various nations of the world, none compared to the one made between living and dying. There were still countless ways for him to have been killed in Sudan, and he had already considered nearly all of them, from being thrown from the truck, to disease, to being on the wrong side of a bored government soldier, but the odds were in his favor and had been from the moment he crossed onto the other side of the rope. The rest since then—the languages, currencies, the darker and paler skins, the curlier versus straighter hair, and the lighter shades of eyes, along with the topography of certain cities and the customs people took for granted, from the times they ate their meals to the way they looked at you when you entered their stores clearly poorly dressed for the cold and more likely than not hungry—was just window dressing to him. People imagined their differences as they needed to, so let them if that was what was called for. He would have never said if you’ve seen one border you’ve seen them all. He respected and noted their differences. He had his favorites among them—the crossing from France into Italy along the Mediterranean coastline being the best of them all. You crossed only really one, maybe two, such borders in your life where the differences were infinitely greater than those between nations, and none at all if you were fortunate. It was these that you had to really note because nothing would ever compare to them again.

  Tennessee he thought cou
ld be something similar—not so much a difference between living and dying but between ways of living that were becoming just as vital to him now that the first had been guaranteed. In Tennessee he would see the missteps and errors in judgment that he knew he must have made in his life, and he could begin to make the adjustments necessary to correct them. He would trim his mustache in Tennessee. He would become one of those clean-shaven men in the catalogues his wife spent hours flipping through each evening. There were certain things he would try for the first time, like scented aftershave and saying hello to strangers he passed on the street with a warm and inviting smile that assured them he too was one of the good citizens of the same free world. He would wear white cotton socks and walk with his shirt untucked. They only had two nights in Tennessee, but he had made provisions to stay longer if need be, stuffing his wallet with a couple hundred extra dollars he had kept hidden from his wife in a drawer, money that he had always thought of as being saved in case of extreme emergency, which perhaps was exactly what this was.

  My mother, for her part, was convinced they were going in the wrong direction. She had studied the map closely before they had left and seen the highlighted path her husband had traced days earlier that had them going slightly out of the way before turning sharply south and then east in the direction of Nashville. They were supposed to have been on that part of the route by now, the sun clearly behind them instead of glaring at them through the windshield with a broad, flat, and seemingly malicious grin that stretched across the horizon in the shape of one long, thin stream of pink clouds. When she thought about telling him, she remembered the numbers. She had done them in her head earlier, a rough estimate given the number of miles she had been able to calculate off the map with a pen and ruler, and knowing her husband’s penchant for driving at almost exactly the speed limit. According to the numbers and the clock on the dashboard, they should be arriving in Nashville in a little more than an hour, perhaps two at most if traffic was unexpectedly bad or if a construction detour was forced upon them. And when that hour or two at most was up, then what? The two of them together on the streets of a city neither of them had been to and knew nothing about—two lost immigrant tourists searching for a place to listen to country music and maybe have dinner so long as the prices were affordable and no one working there gave her one of those looks that was intended to remind her that despite what she may have thought of herself, the rest of the world knew better. No one needed to tell my mother what absurd and tragic figures they would have made on the streets of Nashville, she with her half-swollen face and he with that all-too-eager-to-please look that to her seemed to be the epitome of third-world desperation and poverty—the exact face that Americans expected to see when they asked her how it felt to be in the US of A.